Love Hearts, Chinese Whispers & Bowie...

Did or do you like Love Hearts, the sweets?

I didn’t, I always thought that they were like eating chalk, and the messages were a bit ‘lovey-dovey’ for boys – ‘Hug Me’, ‘Real Love’, ‘Dream Boy’, ‘Kiss Me’, ‘For Ever’, ‘Be Mine’, ‘I’m Yours’, ‘My Girl’ - even ‘Best Pal’ seemed a bit soft.

These days there are some new Love Heart messages – ‘Text Me’, ‘Luv U 24/7’, ‘Friend me’, ‘Think Pink’ to reflect the modern world we live in – what next?

As boys we spoke to each other in language learnt from comics and war films – ‘Roger’, ‘Charlie’, ‘Wilco’. Of course the ‘R’ in ‘Roger’ stood for received. We used ‘Roger’ when pretending to send radio messages to each other on imaginary walkie-talkies (crackle, crackle, pop). Sometimes we’d use ‘Charlie’ – Charlie was what the US army called Viet Cong troops, it came from ‘Victor Charlie’, a radio-alphabetic - VC for Viet Cong. Not that any of us had any idea of that at the time, the Vietnam war was far away and American.

I’m not even sure that when we affirmed ‘Wilco’, in our funny, nasal, radio voices that we knew it was a military abbreviation for ‘will comply’, to us it was just what you said after ‘Roger’.

‘OK’ was another well used Americanism by us boys, or sometimes ‘Okie Dokie’, which was a quirky way of saying okay, although quite where the ‘D’ fitted in is a mystery. My Uncle Charlie used to say ‘Okie Kokie’ whenever he was asked would he like a cuppa, which was a better fit. How the term ‘OK’ was invented is another mystery.

Some say that the Greek words ‘Ola Kala’, meaning ‘everything's good’, was used by Greek railroad workers in the United States and that’s how it entered common usage. Other theories include the initials of the comically misspelled ‘Oll Korrect’ (no I don’t get that either), or ‘Old Kinderhook’ - a nickname for President Martin Van Buren (whoever he was), a reference to Van Buren's birthplace of Kinderhook, New York State. Of course with it being a US word and therefore of historical significance (albeit not as significant as 1066) there are those who claim it to be the Choctaw Indian word ‘okeh’ or even the African Bantu word ‘waw-kay’. All of which are ‘Hunky Dory’ with me.

‘Hunky Dory’ is another US expression apparently, and quite another matter. The theory is that in the 19th century, a street in Yokohama, called ‘Honcho-dori’ was such a favourite hangout of U.S. sailors on shore leave in Japan that ‘Honcho-dori’ entered naval slang as hunky-dory - a synonym for ‘Easy Street’.

Now, how on earth did I get from Love Hearts to an early album by David Bowie? Chinese whispers? Mixed messages? Just goes to show how easy it is to start out trying to say one thing, and end up saying quite another – Roger, Charlie, do you copy? All OK and Hunky Dory. Wilco?

Over and out.

NOT!